Giyeon-ga Mixed-Use Building / Todot Architects and Partners

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The Name of the project, “Giyeon-ga,” meaning “A house with strange encounters’ originates from the hope that many strange encounters and relations form on the site due to the design elements of the project. Probably, people attracted by the concrete curve will sit on the bench at the end of the curve and have a conversation over coffee purchased in the café, leading to another strange encounter.On the third floor is one of the multi-family housing units. The large porch or a terrace plays a role as a yard in front of detached houses. We wanted to provide the type of amenities that houses can offer to these multi-family housing units. The bedroom is directly connected to the porch and the wooden bench. The cave-like space is private and peaceful while open wide to the south side.The project is a mixed-use building composed of a café, offices, and multi-family housing. Rather than sacrificing each program for the other, we designed adequate separation from one another and provided quality outdoor space for each program to extend each program outside the indoor environment. Each outdoor space provides different vibes; it is sometimes covered with artificial grass, sometimes with natural stones, and sometimes with rough stucco. The empty spaces that act as a “container” to experience surrounding natural elements like the river, the sky, and the mountains would soon be filled with the occupants’ plants, furniture, and memories.On the fourth floor is another multi-family housing unit.  A series of windows in the corridor resembles picture frames hung on a gallery wall as each of the window frames provides different pictures. When the sunlight passes by the windows, the windows cast a row of various shadows onto the floor.Text description provided by the architects.The site facing the Seojong district road is narrow and gets wider as one gets deeper. The narrow side of the site is a weakness for a commercial purpose. Fortunately, vehicles rather than pedestrians are predominant in the neighborhood so we imagined a variety of images provided by the project as vehicles pass by.  It displays different impressions from different angles of the road, and, at the same time, flexible curvature attracts the view deep into the site. The surface of the façade is sometimes smooth, sometimes rough, and sometimes bumpy, with a tambour profile. Even the smooth façade transitions into a series of louver columns, which control and alleviate daylight transmits to the indoors. We hoped that such an unconventional volume of the building would promote unexpected interactions within the site.